For example, it was, I think, about four days after the little incident which brings the last chapter to a close. I had charge of the deck from eight to midnight. Miss Aurora had passed half an hour with me, sometimes asking questions by gestures distinguishable by the light of the moon, sometimes attempting strange sentences in English, all the words correctly pronounced, but so misplaced that with true British politeness I was forever breaking into a laugh at her. A moment there had been when she was in earnest. She came to a stand, her face fronting the moon so that I witnessed the working of it, her eyes with a little silver flame in each liquid depth dark as the sea over the side. She spoke in Spanish, with here and there a word of English. It seemed to me she referred to the voyage. I fancied that I worked out of her words the meaning that she desired to continue in the brig, and was content. How did I gather this, when I tell you in the next breath that I could not understand her? Well, it was my _fancy_ of her meaning that I give you, but whether I understood her or not she motioned with an air of tragic distress, clasped her hands, looked up at the stars, and cried in English, “Sad--sad--not understand--sad.” We then resumed our walk, and presently she left me. Now it was that Greaves arrived. He smoked a long curled pipe of Turkish workmanship and moved noiseless in slippers. The moonlight whitened his face and silvered his hair and blackened his eyes till, elsewhere, I might have looked twice without knowing him. We were to the southward of the Lima parallel, our course south by west. The Bolivian coast trends inward. Our course gave us to larboard a wide sweep of open ocean and this we should hold down to the latitude of 50°. After which the chance was small of our falling in with anything armed under Spanish colors. We had made noble progress taking the days all round, and this night we were courtesying onward with a pretty breeze off the larboard beam--a wind that ran the waters gushing white to the bends, and overhead were all the stars and the moon in their midst dimming a circle of them, and under the moon the play of the sea was like a torrent of boiling silver. “This is a desolate ocean,” said Greaves. “So much the better for us,” said I. “Oh, yes, so much the better for us. But the solitude of the sea is a burden that the heart don’t always beat lightly under. Is solitude a material thing? It has the weight of substance when it settles upon the spirits.” I let him talk on. He was fond of big, fine words, and the stranger he became the more heroic grew his vein. “Any more rows forward among the men?” “I have heard of none.”